Wildlife, emergencies and natural hazards

Wildlife emergencies can arise within declared natural disasters caused by hazards such as bushfire, extreme weather events, floods and earthquakes. These emer­gency events can threaten the welfare of individual wild animals, jeopardise the viability of wild populations, and may have serious consequences for human safety, par­ticularly if unauthorised or unskilled intervention is attempted.

The unprecedented bushfires of the 2019-2020 summer exposed a number of deficiencies in Australia’s arrangements for managing the response to, and recovery of, native wildlife affected by bushfires (Sherwin et al. 2023). Development of a nationally coordinated and con­sistent framework for wildlife response during emergen­cies was identified as an important longer-term objective. The following key features are common to effective wild­life emergency response across all hazards and may guide the development of such a framework:

• Wildlife emergency activities are undertaken with consideration and mitigation of human safety risks.

• Wildlife expertise is included in overall incident man­agement planning and operations.

• Wildlife responders work in integration with the wider emergency response effort.

• There is shared understanding of the aims of wildlife response and the means of addressing those aims.

• Appropriate protocols and practices are used for wildlife interventions.

• Wildlife workers adhere to legislative requirements for all wildlife interactions.

• Systematic objective data collection is undertaken to facilitate ongoing improvement of wildlife emergency processes.

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